My mom was a screenwriter. I saw a lot of people who didn't seem very fulfilled creatively or otherwise by their roles in the motion picture industry.

Sacrificing one's life on the altar of literature is in some ways like sacrificing a goat to some malicious spirit. It's not always a humane or necessary decision.

Hollywood is famous for breeding monsters, and having worked in the business, I've known a lot of them. But only intermittently have I ever found them monstrous. They have many other qualities.

Much to my surprise, there's a sense for people in the cable industry that fiction writers might actually be good at script writing. You can write dialogue!

It's hard enough to make a novel a novel. I wouldn't know how to make it something else at the same time

I sometimes get asked if I think about film stuff while I'm writing fiction, and the answer is, of course not.

These are the kind of movies that only a real apparatchik, someone who thinks that corporations are people, could love.

During the 90s, I watched a lot of people getting fat and prosperous, and I thought, culture itself is the casualty of this.

There was a moment when the Berlin Wall came down and some people felt, "Oh capitalism won. That's the ideology we can believe in now."

It's hard to imagine there's a place for great writing inside a multinational conglomerate.

Everybody says, TV is great, the writer has so much power. I'm still trying to convince myself that's true. When do the writers ever have power? Ever? They don't. Even in the book industry.

Materialism is not having things, it is letting things have you.

You have an ocean of love in your heart. Then why are you too stingy to give it away?

Children...need most of the same things adults need--consideration, respect for their work, the knowledge that they and the things they do are taken seriously.

It's animal by animal that you save a species.

Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called 'Ego'.

There's always kids who become stop motion animators. I get stuff all the time. They put it on YouTube. It's exciting to see.

What we need are critical lovers of America - patriots who express their faith in their country by working to improve it.

In my life, I've dealt with tragedy.

My policy is I will help any policymaker who asks, whether they be a Republican or a Democrat.

Consider that we shouldn't call our brother a fool, since we don't know ourselves what we are.